DUO
Cuisine: Bistro
Address: 138 Hinemoa St, Birkenhead
Contact: 027 213 8591
Reservations: Accepted
Drinks: Fully licensed
From the menu: Pāua doughnut $12; fried cauliflower $13; tempura courgette $28; snapper sashimi $28; pork $30; panna cotta $14
Rating: 18/20
Score: 0-7 Steer clear. 8-12 Disappointing, give it a miss. 13-15
My only reservation about sending you to this wonderful Birkenhead restaurant is that there is barely room for the people who already want to eat here. Duo is busy from the moment it opens, as a cafe, at 7am each morning, to a line of locals bravely holding out on the Nespresso corporation in the hope of a slightly better cup of coffee made by somebody with warm blood.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.Not content with burning the candle before dawn, owners Jordan and Sarah MacDonald now light it up after dark as well, serving dinner three nights a week (soon it will be five). Booking a couple of days ahead for Thursday I could only get in at 8.30pm, though when I asked about it, Sarah, who runs the floor, told me it was an uncharacteristically quiet night.
Her husband Jordan is most famous for his work at the excellent city restaurant Culprit, but surely this is the better business model: selling dinners to North Shore ratepayers urgently trying to spend their house equity before it disappears.
Parking is easy, the room is simple but inviting and the food is surprisingly interesting. Duo could presumably survive serving steak and snapper but they change the menu every couple of weeks, with a generous list of specials chalked up on the blackboard each evening.
This is a beautiful way to run a restaurant — offering crayfish only because the weather was settled enough this morning for the boats to get out on the water; serving zucchini because we’re at that magic part of summer where the big yellow flowers are attached to slender, tender fruit and you can present the whole magnificent structure on a plate, stuffed with prawn and more of that crayfish (the two are blended into a rough paste which is generously spooned into the blossom until it’s plump and firm to the fork).
Everything is gaspably good, and the dishes arrive in mostly single file, giving you a chance to admire, explore and, eventually, consume each one before the waiter replaces your cutlery and brings you the next course. Sarah runs the service closely and confidently, giving you as much information as you need to make a choice but revealing a great depth of knowledge when required.
I asked for an interesting wine and she poured me a beautiful blend from Kenzie in Hawke’s Bay — with the sort of coaxing aromas you can achieve by combining three different varietals in the glass, a skin-contact white that doesn’t try to hide its orangeness. I told Sarah I hadn’t heard of the producer before and she told me he was an Australian who’d moved to the bay and makes very limited quantities of wine for those lucky enough to find it.
“Nice label,” I said, and she told me the Aussie bloke painted it himself.
“Where is … Waio …hinga …” I trailed off, my head cocked 90 degrees as I tried to read a long, unfamiliar place name written vertically on the bottle.
“It’s te reo for Esk River,” she said, starting to become, at this point, less of a sommelier and more like that new AI everyone says is better than Google.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Don’t miss the sashimi, served with a combination of ingredients I think might be my favourite in the city. Six slices of fresh pink snapper, each curled into a three-dimensional teepee and placed on a delicate oyster cream with a tiny dark pile of vintage caviar balanced on top. Finally, a little tart apple syrup and lemon oil are drizzled over lightly and if you close your eyes right now I hope you can almost feel the raw fish on your tongue while the rich, vague sweetness of the cream temporarily blankets your grateful taste buds, then the sour ingredients move in to do their thing and, finally, the caviar explodes between your back teeth, adding traces of salty brine to the mix.
But even the simple things are done well, like a cauliflower side dish where the small florets come in a crunchy tempura instead of the more familiar roasting, a little pomegranate syrup squirted on the cauli and then big whole leaves of mint and parsley scattered over the plate for freshness, colour and aroma.
The only dish I couldn’t quite make my mind up on was the panna cotta. It was texturally perfect, looked great, was flecked with vanilla and came with finely diced seasonal strawberries in a little syrup — the perfect match. But the cotta itself was missing flavour — made with buttermilk, it didn’t have that ingredient’s sourness, or the very light sweetness of cream. Though no Italian would ever put salt in this dessert, I did reach the conclusion that it needed seasoning of some sort to bring out the personality of the base liquid.
That’s a small observation on an otherwise perfect meal. They’re onto a winning formula here, and I’m looking forward to returning after a change of season to see what else they can do.
More On The Shore
Restaurants, wine bars, sensational flavours.
Stanley Avenue Is Milford’s Gloriously Indulgent Wine Bar. The North Shore wine bar and bistro has an unmistakable nous for creating charming plates.
Tokki’s Refined-But-Comforting Sweet Spot. Find sensational flavours and a room full of rabbits at this Milford newcomer.
At Moxie, Book Your Table & Then Book Your Beef. The Beef Wellington was a dish of such topographical singularity that I can’t forget it, writes Jesse Mulligan.
Milford’s Portal To Paris? A Wonderful Little Wine Bar. Find a blackboard menu and a charcuterie slicer, scorched sourdough and garlicky burrata.
